Events, dear boy, events.

“On November 15th, my account was locked again. This time, I was told I must delete a tweet from October, saying, “Women aren’t men,” and another, asking, “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?”

After dutifully deleting the tweets in question in order to gain access to my account again, I tweeted, angrily, “This is fucking bullshit, @twitter. I’m not allowed to say that men aren’t women or ask questions about the notion of transgenderism at all anymore? That a multi-billion dollar company is censoring basic facts and silencing people who ask questions about this dogma is insane.” This tweet went viral, racking up 20,000 likes before Twitter locked my account again on Monday morning, demanding I delete it. This time they offered no explanation at all — not even a vague accusation of “hateful conduct.” (feminist current)

Ms. Murphy touched the dreaded third rail. She suggested that women are women and if you are a man in a dress, well, you aren’t.

The SJWs at Twitter were having none of that and Ms. Murphy was kicked to the tall grass.

As she flew through the air it occurred to Ms. Murphy that, perhaps, this censorship was a bug, not a feature of left-wing identity politics.

“While the left continues to vilify me, and liberal and mainstream media continue to mostly ignore feminist analysis of gender identity, people like Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro (and hundreds of right wingers and free speech advocates online), and right wing media outlets like the Daily Wire and The Blaze have either attempted to speak with me and understand my perspective, expressed support, or covered this undeniably ridiculous decision on the part of Twitter.” (feminist current)

When my pal Dr. Dawg, he of impecable lefty credentials, left Twitter voluntarily, he did so because of a similar crisis of identity politics. Either you are with us or you’re a fascist howled the Twitter brigades.

The SJW idea seems to be that self-identification trumps all and if you disagree, well, yer’a Nazi and you have no right to speak.

Saves a lot of thinking time.

Reasonable people can manage to hold somewhat contradictory ideas all at the same time. On the one hand a person self identifies as being of the opposite gender, on the other, that does not make him a woman or vice versa.

I might, simply to save on smokes, self identify as a First Nations person. It would be incredibly disrespectful but, on the SJW logic, my choice has to be respected in the face of all evidence to the contrary. My total lack of recognition by any First Nation should not matter.

It is possible, after a long journey and with a little luck, I might be “adopted” into a First Nations family and, with a ton of effort on my part, I might, maybe, be accepted as something of an adopted member of a particular First Nation. But I doubt it. Which is exactly right.

The complications of Canadian author Joseph Boyden’s claim of First Nation’s, what? Heritage? Ancestory? suggest that assertions of First Nations identity are, rightly, treated with a degree of scepticism by the First Nations themselves. (Great, long, article in the Globe and Mail on Boyden.)

Is it wrong to treat a man’s claim to womanhood or a woman’s claim to manhood with the same scepticism?

While it might be polite to respect a person’s choice in pronouns, it might be a slightly bigger deal to respect their choice in bathrooms and a very big deal indeed to accept their claims to the experience of growing up female or male. “I always knew I was a woman.” is not actually the same experience as “I grew up female.”

It is always fun to watch a lefty realize that conformity of opinion is a requirement, not an option, on the more radical fringes of the left. As Lindsay Shepherd discovered, even suggesting that people analyze “the other side” is enough to have you dragged in front of what amount to heresy tribunals. And the only people who supported her were us crazed, right wing, free speech advocates.

Ms. Murphy has, I suspect, made her career. Two weeks ago no one had heard of her or Feminist Current the webzine she edits, today she was invited onto the Dave Rubin Show and quasi-Con Ben Shapiro has a crush.

Most importantly, Ms. Murphy has, as the expression goes, spoken truth to power and been kicked in the teeth for her trouble. She seems very smart, a good writer and more than capable of connecting the proverbial dots.

““We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”

This is not “just weather” as the CO2 cultists like to describe any form of colder than expected conditions. This is one of the drivers of the earth’s climate and a basic component to climate.

A highly qualified and highly regarded scientist, Dr Abdussamatov is Head of Space Research Laboratory at the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Sunspots come and go, but the Carbon Dioxide alarmism persists in the face of new and better modelling, here’s another chart:

CO2 sensitivity is an attempt to estimate the effect on teperature of a doubling of the CO2 in the atomsphere. We’re at about 400ppm now, what would happen if that went to 800ppm?

To get buy in for serious carbon taxes you pretty much have to say that 800 is going to lead to 2+ degrees Celius of warming and then try to make the claim that this level of warming will kill lots of us. As the science becomes more exact it is becoming clear that a doubling of CO2 is going to have a hard time creating 2 degrees of warming. Worth reading this post.

I have argued for years that the science is not yet ready for policy purposes. But the Trudeau government and the Scheer Conservatives presume that Canadians are too dumb to notice that the science underlying a carbon tax or whatever dimwitted scheme Scheer is touting – apparently based on the failed Australian model – are going to cost a lot and change, literally, nothing.

It is going to take a while for Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada to catch on. But Bernier is a climate sceptic and an economic realist. As people begin to realize that the “carbon” tax or cap and trade and, frankly, all the other non-solutions to a non-problem, are simply bogus ways of taking money out of their pocket, Max is going to become a lot more appealing.

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Democrats take the House, Republicans take the Senate, Trump? Well that is more difficult.

For the first two years of his Presidency, Trump nominally enjoyed the “support” of both the House and the Senate. However, between the never Trumpers and the GOPe, that “support” was mixed at best. He was stuck with insane spending bills, hamstrung on immigration and required to make nice with members of his own party even as they refused to use their majorities to pass his legislation or confirm his appointees. He had serious opposition but he was limited by party loyalty from calling out that opposition.

No more.

Trump now has a Democratic opponent which is not just the mainstream media. Better still, it is an opponent which contains a legion of quite sensible, moderate, people and a wonderfully unhinged minority – many of whom are in line for Committee Chairmanships. If we have learned anything about Trump it is that he thrives on opposition.

At the same time, Trump’s people will have to recognize the weaknesses the House races outlined. Winning a second term and taking back the House requires some hard work from the White House. The Democrats held their urban base and there is no reason to think that will shift much in 2020, where there are gains to be made is in suburbia. Which means Trump has to combine running against the crazies in the Democratic Party with an appeal to suburban women. It’s a tough get because what drives suburban women crazy about Trump is more about demeanour and style rather than policy. The “tough guy, NYC real estate tycoon” persona is a hard sell on the school run.

Trump has about six months to get his White House in order, deal with Mueller, goad Maxime Waters into trying to impeach him, fire Jeff Sessions (and restore the rule of law), and reach out to the many, moderate, Democrats who will be going to Washington to get things done. In a sense he needs to be running on two tracks: the first in defiant opposition to the crazy wing of the Democratic/Media Party, the second is to rack up a steady string of accomplishments, bi-partisan engagement and reasonable appointments.

The way to win in the suburbs is to look less crazy and more competent than the Democratic alternative. Given that Trump is resolutely non-ideological and, so far as can be seen, has no non-negotiable policy positions whatsoever, running the Presidency on the basis of MAGA and America First, this should not be difficult.

Of course, that sort of strategy depends on the Democrats in the House being unable to restrain their crazies. It is possible, albeit unlikely, that the Democrats won’t give Trump the foil he needs. The party elders – if there are any left – may be able to persuade the hotheads that impeachment without any chance of conviction is a very bad idea. Or that holding hearings into the details of Trump’s 1984 tax return will not galvanize the citizenry.

The one great impediment to the restraint of the crazy wing of the Democratic Party is the Trump Derangement of the mainstream media. CNN, MSNBC, the networks, the NYT and WaPo and even Fox realized some time ago that opposing Trump was very, very good for business. But that opposition needs fresh meat every news cycle. Where better to find that fresh meat than in the crazy wing of the Democratic Party. Especially, if many of the crazies are now, portentously, House Committee Chair _______.

There are incentives for both Trump and the non-crazy wing of the Democrats to moderate the tone of political discourse in America. There are opposite incentives for the media and for the crazies. Television, and to a lesser degree, print media thrive on conflict. So do ambitious Committee Chairs and agenda driven “backbenchers”. It is a marriage made in Hell.

From Trump’s perspective, the media was and is the enemy. He is entirely unafraid of the media because two years of unrelenting hostility has not hurt him a bit. If anything, stoking the partisan fury of the MSM will simply help Trump appear reasonable in the suburbs he needs to win. If the media in its fury promotes the loudest, most divisive, craziest Democratic Party voices, Trump wins. Trump likes winning.

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It is still early but according to the NYT’s site the Democrats have picked up 25 seats in the House and lost a few in the Senate.

It’s too bad about the House. There will be mischief afoot as dimwits like Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters gain gavels and start “investigations”. Trump may well be impeached.

It won’t matter.

While it would certainly have been wonderful for the Republicans to keep the majority in the House, it was not critical. The House of Representatives was, deliberately, created as the weakest branch of the Federal government. The Senate, elected for six years, advises and consents on Cabinet appointments and the judiciary. The House does not. The House does have the capacity to initiate spending bills, enact laws and conduct investigations; but it has no significant veto power over a President. Of course, the House can, and probably will, impeach the President or a sitting Justice of the Supreme Court; but the trial of the action takes place in the Senate. The Republicans, specifically the Trump Republicans, won the Senate. Right now 51 (plus a sure pickup in Mississippi’s runoff election in a couple of weeks) to 42. The likely end numbers will be around 55 to 45.

From a Presidential point of view, a friendly Senate matters a lot. You can make a deal with the House, you can appoint away the Dem majority – keep that UN ambassadorship open for a statesmanlike Democrat – and you can position candidates to take back the House in the next election which is only two years away. Senators sit for six years and are far more consequential than Representatives.

If you looked where Trump rallied you see a series of Senate wins – Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee and Texas. This was a calculation: re-enforce strength where it will matter for the rest of your Presidency.

I have no doubt Trump would have been delighted to have held the House, but he had to win the Senate. And he did.

The Blue Wave crashed against the breakwater of the Senate and, now, it’s done.

Onwards.

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With less than a day to Mid-Term election day polls are narrowing and pundits are coming up with all sorts of reasons why the Democrats will hold the House of Representatives. Most of the pundits – who are pretty universally Democrat-leaning – have conceded that the Republicans will hold the Senate but the House seems to offer the best chance for a Democratic victory. I wrote a month ago that I was not convinced that the House would swing Democrat and I ascribed that to the popularity of President Trump.

After a month of hectic campaigning, I see no reason to revise that thinking. In fact, if anything, the Republicans seem to have been galvanized by the Trump rallies, the Kavanaugh outrage and the poor people in the caravan(s) heading for America’s southern borders.

Early voting is up. Much higher than it usually is for mid-term elections. And in states where people are registered Democrats or Republicans, it appears more registered Republicans are voting early than Democrats.

2016 demonstrated that the polling model – generally and specifically – is badly broken. However, the question is whether the breakage is valanced in any way. The reason why polling is broken is that people are not as willing to answer their phones as they were twenty or even ten years ago and large numbers of people no longer have landlines. Their mobile is their only phone. And you cannot legally autodial cell phones. Ten years ago you could argue that the cell revolution skewed young and therefore young people were likely undersampled. In theory, young people were more likely to support Democrats thus the cell issue was valanced with Democratic Party support underreported.

To compensate for this, polling organizations overweight their samples to try and capture the missing Democratic support. It is a dark art and one which grows increasingly unreliable as more and more people become unreachable or unresponsive to pollsters.

The other huge change in the last decade is the waning of the influence of mass (and hugely liberal) media. Newspapers are in their death throes, network television is fighting for audience with cable and both are being sidelined by everything from Netflix to You-Tube to Facebook. Where people get their news and where they see advertising has profoundly changed.

A decade ago, in a tight race, a Party might make a strategic TV ad buy to haul its candidate across the finish line. Parties are still doing this but it is not at all obvious that races can be swung with a million dollar last-minute ad buy.

So how will the 50 or so House races which matter be decided?

I am pretty certain that many of these races will come down to which party gets out its vote, the good old-fashioned “ground game” with some information age bells and whistles.

Which is the reason I think the best indicator of tomorrow’s result is the surge in early registered Republican voting. The ground game begins long before the election and one of the key strategies is to get your identified voters to the polls as early as possible. The logic being that that reduces the amount of work which has to be done on election day. The Republicans spent a lot of time and a lot of money identifying their supporters in battleground states in the 2016 election. Those lists are fresh and available to candidates and campaigns.

E-Day tactics have not changed much in fifty years. A successful campaign will target its supporters who have not voted and get them to the polls. Phone calls and, even better, door knocks can make a huge difference in the final result. It is hard, not very glamorous, work.

But the Trump machine has done something no mid-term campaign in history has done: it has managed to get its activist core to register themselves as activists. This was the brilliance of the Trump rallies.

I very much doubt that a single mind was changed as Trump rocketed from hanger to hanger with Air Force One doing double duty as the world’s most exclusive stage prop. The rallies were all about affirmation, being part of something, knowing you were not alone. But they were also a brilliant way to collect GOTV data.

To go to a rally you had to register, online, for a ticket. Literally, tens of thousands of hard core Trump supporters registered. Over all I suspect well over a million people willingly gave up their emails and phone number for a chance to get a ticket to the Trumpaloza in their state. Which meant they self-identified as Trump Republicans. And it also gave individual campaigns lists of people who were likely to a) vote early, b) be willing to work on the GOTV effort, c) be ready, willing and able to knock on the doors for the E-Day effort.

Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, is data driven. But he also understands that data without action is pointless. The rallies with their registrations have given the Republicans an army in the battlefield states the likes of which the Republicans have never had before.

We’ll see on Tuesday if it is enough to add seats in the Senate and hold the House.

It will depend on who shows up.

Update: Tuesday Afternoon. Reading anecdotal reports on turnout. The general trend seems to be high turnouts – at or better than Presidential – in red areas. Low turnout reported in some blue areas. You have to read a lot of reports to get a decent picture and there will be confirmation bias all over the place; but those trends are what will be needed for a red wave.

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Another day, another packed out Trump rally. Set against the backdrop of Air Force One Trump delivered another, very odd, Trumpian stemwinder to the good people of Columbia, MO. There was not a lot new in this speech. Just the by now familiar hits on the media, firmness on borders and a fair bit of chest thumping about how well it has all gone to date. The fans never tire of this.

I don’t think for a second that Trump pays a lot of attention to the campaign strategies of the past; but he has inadvertently recovered the idea of a President, of a candidate, speaking directly to the electors. Neil Postman wrote about the Lincoln/Douglas debates which were all day affairs and reported verbatim in the popular press. 90 years later, Truman got aboard a train and made a speech – very likely much the same speech – at hundreds of stations across America.

Trump is not Truman and he certainly isn’t Lincoln, but he has a very keen sense of what works in the America he actually knows.

For a lot of American Presidents, the ascension to office marks the last time they really deal with Americans face to face. All of a sudden they have the access to TV and to journalists and, somehow, the stump speech gets lost in the green room.

Teddy Roosevelt essentially invented the whistlestop tour and he invented the White House press corps. He did both because he wanted to be able to speak directly to Americans, his Americans. His cousin, FDR, skipped past a largely hostile press with his Fireside Chats. Both men understood the necessity of speaking to Americans without filters and without spin. But, as television took over, that became something of a lost art.

Until Trump.

Frankly, I think Trump’s rallies owe more to Professional Wrestling than to a careful analysis of his predecessors’ communications strategies. But here’s the thing, Professional Wrestling is a wildly popular entertainment in the US. The Sunday morning talks, not so much.

Trump is all about open access. He can’t climb on a helicopter without holding an impromptu press conference. He is unworried about the talking points. What he wants to do is connect.

I am very confident that the GOP will win the Senate next Tuesday. The Map, the polls and so on. I am also confident that the Trump Republicans have a very clear shot at winning the House. Yes, I have seen the polls and the Cook Report and all manner of Nate Silver stats; I don’t think they actually matter. I think Trump has connected at a visceral level with his American people.

The House races, in aggregate, are very much like the Popular Vote in a Presidential election. You can lose the popular vote, and I think the Republican will poll fewer votes than the Democrats for the House, but the distribution of the votes is what actually matters. A district here, a district there and super majorities for the Democrats in Districts they have won for forty years, and a Republican majority will emerge. It might be tight, or it might not. It is quite possible that the Republicans will increase their majority in the House. It will depend on specific districts, specific races, and Trump’s people know that.

Trump likes winning. He is doing 11 campaign rallies in five days because he thinks it might be enough to win.

I think he’s right.

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At the moment, in the south of Mexico, there are about 5000 people walking, bussing and being given lifts so that they can reach the American border in time to create really brilliant pre-election footage of nasty white men acting on the orders of the Orange Ogre beating up, if not outright shooting, the veneer of women and children who act as the vanguard for the caravan.

This is pretty clearly an organized operation. The Hondurans did not all wake up a week ago and decide, spontanously, to march to America. Who funded the organization is an interesting question which will almost certainly not be answered before the human tide rolls in. And it actually doesn’t matter because the issue does not go away because it turns out that Soros or the Democratic National Committee provided the money.

Migration, mass or otherwise, is likely to be the dominant issue in the 21st century. And not just any sort of migration; the migration of desperately poor people to wealthier places. Whether they are sub-Saharan Africans, Middle Eastern Muslims or the masses of the Central American poor, the issue is going to remain the same: what do weathy nations owe the people of poorer nations, if anything.

Truth to tell, the US could let the entire caravan into the country, sort out the obvious criminals and other undesirables and let the rest stay without breaking a sweat. 5000 people is simply not enough to really matter in the grand scheme of the United States. (And this may very well be what Trump ends up doing as it has the best political optics assuming the caravan makes it to the US border.)

The trouble with that solution is that it would rather obviously create a huge incentive for more caravans to set out. While 5000 people would be a drop in the bucket, 50,000 would be a huge problem and 500,000 would be catastrophic. The dilemma is how to be compassionate without creating the conditions favouring more caravans.

Americans are tremendously generous people and they have a remarkable capacity to get things done quickly and effectively. One potentially reasonable solution would be to set up processing stations deep inside Mexico with accomodation, food and even cash incentives to bring the caravaners of the march and into a process which would treat their asylum claims seriously and legally. Logistically, setting up the first processing station a hundred miles ahead of the caravan would not be easy, but it would also not be the only station.

This sort of approach would require the permission and support of the Mexican government but that should be relatively easy to secure. It would also require a serious commitment on the part of the Trump administration to actually understand what is driving the migrants. Again, not impossible.

Politically, putting resources into a line of processing stations up to the American border designed to blunt the force of the caravan seems like a solution which all but the most partisan anti-Trumpers could get behind. It would also set the stage for the second element of a compassionate and common sense solution.

The way to stop caravans is to work towards eliminating the conditions from which they arise. The caravan’s organizers began the caravan in a desperately poor part of a violent and gang ridden very nearly failed state. Make Honduras Great Again sounds a bit facile but, if the US wants to reduce pressure on its borders, it needs successful states in Central and South America.

Sixty years of American foreign policy in Central and South America has not done a speck of good. (I suspect because of a combination of misguided support for assorted dictators and billions of dollars of exactly the wrong sort of foreign aid.) There are lots of good ways to improve conditions in Central and South America but they mainly involve private investment and a willingness to trade aggressively with those countries. Taking a second and a third look at the costs of the “war on drugs” would also be a good idea.

Previous administrations were largely unable to tackle these sorts of iniatives if only because they could not think much outside the “foreign aid/”stable” government” box. Trump does not even know there is such a box.

Making progress in Central and South America using a new model which combined private investment with trade and provided support to the governments as they dealt with their gang problems would take time. But it would also provide Trump with a political theme above and beyond “Keep America Great” for the 2020 election.

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I have been joking for a year that when Legalization Day arrives in BC we won’t notice any difference. I suspect that will be true tomorrow simply because very little of the infrastructure of legalized pot will be ready to go on Day 1.

The biggest difference will be that the people who will assemble to enjoy being able to smoke pot without the slightest chance of arrest (not that there is much chance of arrest now) will all be smoking illegal pot because there is, according to the Globe and Mail, exactly one fully licenced pot shop ready to go for Day 1. Plus there is and will remain a significant supply shortage as the various licenced growers ramp up the production of their “biological assets”.

The great error of the Canadian marijuana advocates was to accept “legalization” rather than demanding “decriminalization”. This has doomed Canada to repeat the American experience of creating a heavily regulated cannabis industry with so called “seed to sale” product tracking, licenced pot shops, provincial wholesale monopolies and all manner of other state intrusions. The layers of regulation might even suggest that the idea that pot is harmless does not reflect the Liberals’ actual thinking.

At the same time, the personal grow show exemption allowing the cultivation of up to four plants for personal use is going to hole the great barge of regulation under the waterline. It will not take all that many people growing to provide an abundant, unregulated, supply of potlatch pot. The potlatch element comes from the fact you cannot sell your crop, but you can give it away. A mildly competent grower – and there are plenty out there – should be able to grow a pound of pot per plant. An ambitious grower should be able to harvest 3 or 4 times per year. A pound is roughly 450 grams and if you think about that at the notional rate of $10 a gram, that is $18,000 worth of untaxed pot every quarter.

There is no question that home grows in closets will be a thing, the only question is how big a thing.

At the moment there are some very big companies involved in the cannabis business in Canada. Companies whose market caps are several times the estimated size of the Canadian retail recreational marijuana market. There are also plenty of large scale growers who have not jumped through the Health Canada regulatory hoops. There will be pressure on the federal and provincial governments to enforce the seed to sale regulation of legal pot. But there will be market pressure to ignore the regulatory scheme from pot activists, “independent growers” and, I suspect, urban and rural First Nations who have no particular stake in the regulatory scheme. Just as I can drive three miles from my home and buy fireworks on a nearby reserve in defiance of municipal and provincial law, it would hardly be surprising to see excise stamp free marijuana for sale in those same locations.

Astoundingly, the legalization of marijuana is likely to be the only basic accomplishment of the first Trudeau government. The early indications are October 17 will be celebrated with clouds of illegal pot, regulatory chaos and a boost to the grey and black markets as police and Crown will no longer have even the threat of possession charges. A few months from now there will be the inevitable “oversupply” of recreational marijuana with the corresponding drop in wholesale and then retail prices. Which, in its turn, will collapse such tax windfalls which legal pot were promised to bring.

The chaos of the Canadian “legalization” of marijuana will take a year or so to really hit home. Just in time for the October 2019 federal election.